


let the winds of wander blow

by openmouthwideeye



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 10:39:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openmouthwideeye/pseuds/openmouthwideeye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Knowledge helps but little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	let the winds of wander blow

**Author's Note:**

> Found this on my harddrive and decided to spruce it up a bit. An aimless little vignette, really. I must go back and reacquaint myself with book!Tyrion if he's going to keep cropping up in my fics like this. 
> 
> *title borrowed from A Fine Frenzy

“You might just be the single plainest woman in the Seven Kingdoms. You are most certainly the tallest.”

Brienne hunches reflexively, edging closer to the hearth.

It is not the worst observation she has ever heard, nor the most hurtful. Those came long ago, when her skin was not so thick and scarred.

“False flattery does no one good,” she tells Lord Tyrion thickly. “’Plain’ is no longer a word to describe me.”

Her hanging scar is thick and shiny, sucked dry of color by the winter winds and fanned to a livid flame by the heat of their fire. Her face is so grotesque as to make even the roughest sorts of travelers turn to the woods.

“’Deformed’ is an ugly word,” Tyrion tells her, running a wide, absent finger along the jagged pink line bisecting his face. “And you and I have quite enough of that already.”

If he intends to sound droll—he is Jaime’s brother, so she suspects he does—he overshoots his target. The attention to the scar that scooped out his nose only serves to remind Brienne of the gaping hole in her cheek.

She can feel Biter’s weight as she probes it with her mind, a counterbalance to the missing flesh. She can feel pain, distant and inescapable, as the weight of her armor sinks her into the mire that has swallowed her first foe. Rorge is immense, a dead weight in the mud beside her, the hole where his nose had been a black pit between the iron bars of his helm.

She imagines Lord Tyrion in the Hound’s helm and shivers.

“Ungracious of you,” Tyrion notes sourly.

“I – am sorry, my lord,” she does not know how much of her ravaged voice is the harshness of winter, and how much the cruel repercussion of her failures. “I was thinking of – “

She does not tell him what she was thinking of. He does not ask.

She cannot help but trace the lines slashing the freckles on her knuckles. She is battered from her face to her feet, and so, so tired.

The silence stretches and pops with the fire, and Tyrion continues his previous musings.

“You know,” he says. “Hulking build and sunken facial scars aside, you’re really quite lovely.”

Brienne ignores him, grinding her teeth and staring into the fire. It is the light, harsh and hot against the bitter black night, that steals the moisture from her eyes until she fears them turned to stone.

She does not know if he means it in jest, or if he is comparing her broad features to his own. She does not care to find out.

“Rather,” he backtracks, surprising her not at all. She waits for the end of the jape, “My brother seems to think so.”

Her heart freezes, as though it has suddenly leapt from the warm cage of her chest to die in the snow bank beyond their fire. She tells herself that words are wind, even as they latch onto her heart like tiny, wriggling leeches.

“You certainly possess a comeliness of spirit,” the dwarf muses almost absently. But his eyes are keen and her face is mottled red and white, tinged with purple from the cold. “My wife has found love with the Hound, to hear Jaime tell it, so I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.”

She thinks of Sansa, strong and sweet and utterly trusting of the broad, scarred man who swore to see her safe to Winterfell.

“Are you mute?” Tyrion asks archly, stretching out along the frozen dirt, his head pillowed on Brienne’s saddlebags.

_I have long ago learned the futility of dreaming_ , she does not tell him. She is sure he’d sense the falsehood, see the images of his brother dancing behind her eyes.

“I speak when there is something worth discussing,” she answers shortly.

“And Jaime does not qualify?”

_My dreams of Jaime do not._

“The Hound has found love,” she mutters, though she does not fully believe it, nor does she wish to. Sansa Stark is innocent and pure, Sandor Clegane anything but. “Was she not _your_ wife?”

The words feel odd on her tongue, barbed in a way she dislikes. But she cannot take them back.

She sees the ghost dance behind his eyes, but he closes his lids, contains them.

“Sansa Lannister was a figment,” he tells her, voice tinged with something akin to wanting. Akin as the Stark girls are akin: kindred and unmistakably disparate. His eyes meet the sky, black and vast and starless. “Sansa Stark learned to see beauty buried deep. She simply failed to find it where it was expected of her.”

She grunts, his words scraping her heart as a whetstone hones a blade.

Tyrion shifts his head on his makeshift pillow, his eyes dancing at her with brotherly mischief. It looks vaguely sinister in the shadow of the flame.

“Jaime is our Sansa Stark. Pity you’ve reawakened this devotion in him. Vows and honor,” he muses. “ _Chastity_.”

“Honor is not the same as blind devotion,” she rasps, for she knows he sees it as such. It is a lesson hard learned, a war she has not yet won.

“No,” Tyrion says mildly. “His devotion to you is anything but blind.”

She falls into silence, uncomfortable and lost, unable to guess which words are japes, which misread truth.

Tyrion snorts, “How else might I find myself roaming the blasted waste north of the Wall?”

“Your knowledge of dragons is invaluable,” she reminds him stoutly.

“Knowledge,” he scoffs. “Jaime is here for you, and I for him.”

He has spoken her into silence. Brienne shifts on the frozen ground. The worry she thought contained flares to vibrancy. Her eyes scan the darkness beyond their small fire, and her pulse throbs painfully with every breath Jaime has been gone.

“It sounds like the start of some horrific tale,” Tyrion japes, pulling her heart from the blackness. “The hopeless wanderings of a noseless dwarf, a golden cripple, and a beast in skirts. Our squire remains in Castle Black by necessity,” he admits, as though it were a decision made in the haste of adventure and Pod’s betrayed face does not trail her through the wild North.

Tyrion’s mismatched eyes rake her for a moment, dancing wickedly.

“We must needs invent the skirts.”

“You will _not_ ,” she insists.

For a heartspan it seems that this darkness will end; that Tyrion will withdraw to Casterly Rock and procure a score of minstrels to impart the knowledge of beasts and bitterness, love and longing.

He pushes himself up on her saddlebags, leers at the heavy woolen breeches peeking out behind her furs.

“I see now why he dislikes the skirts.”

She opens her mouth in affront, tenses her muscles as if to spring, but before she can prove why _she_ dislikes skirts, the night is pierced with the sharp crack of frozen twigs splintering underfoot.

“Blasted North,” she hears Jaime before she sees him, and her eyes leap eagerly to the edge of their firelight, where his form twists and resolves, a bit of shadow emerging into the sun.

Jaime dumps half an armload of dying branches and scraggly brush onto the half-frozen soil by the fire. They have learned through trial the necessity of thawing the wood before adding it to the flames.

“White walkers?” she asks, and Jaime shakes his head.

“Dragons?” is Tyrion’s refrain.

He is met with the same response, short and definitive, as though denying the creatures’ presence might call them down upon them.

“Cold and snow and more cold,” he mutters, settling beside Brienne and edging his boots nearer the flames.

The warmth of him seeps through the scant air between them and settles deep into her bones. She had not known how cold she was. She edges closer, pressing against him, feeling foolish and untoward and telling herself it is necessary.

Jaime does not seem to mind.

Tyrion watches her plainly through the flames, and his face says all she will not.

**Author's Note:**

> Please take a few moments and leave some feedback!


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